Georg [György] Lukács

First published Mon Nov 4, 2013

Georg (György) Lukács (1885–1971) was a literary theorist
and philosopher who is widely viewed as one of the founders of
“Western Marxism”. Lukács is best known for his
pre-World War II writings in literary theory, aesthetic theory and
Marxist philosophy. Today, his most widely read works are the
Theory of the Novel of 1916 and History and Class
Consciousness of 1923. In History and Class
Consciousness, Lukács laid out a wide-ranging critique of
the phenomenon of “reification” in capitalism and
formulated a vision of Marxism as a self-conscious transformation of
society. This text became an important reference point both for
critical social theory and for many currents of countercultural
thought. Even though his later work could not capture the imagination
of the intellectual public as much as his earlier writings,
Lukács remained a prolific writer and an influential theorist in
his later career and published hundreds of articles on literary theory
and aesthetics, not to mention numerous books, including two massive
works on aesthetics and ontology. He was also active as a politician
in Hungary in both the revolution of 1919 and during the events of
1956. Today, his work remains of philosophical interest not only
because it contains the promise of a reformulation of an undogmatic,
non-reductionist Marxism, but also because it connects a philosophical
approach drawing on Neo-Kantianism, Hegel and Marx with an acute
cultural sensitivity and a powerful critique of modern life inspired
by Weber's and Simmel's sociological analyses of modern
rationalization.

Georg
Lukács was born on April 13, 1885 in Budapest as Bernát
György Löwinger. His father, the influential banker
József Löwinger, changed the Jewish family name to the
Hungarian surname Lukács in 1890. In 1899, the family was
admitted into the nobility. Already as a high school student,
Lukács developed a keen interest in literature and especially
drama, publishing numerous reviews of theater plays in the Hungarian
press and even founding a theater society.

Lukács received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University
of Kolozsvár in 1906 and a doctorate from the University of
Budapest in 1909, after submitting parts of his manuscript on the
“History of the Modern Drama”. In the following nine
years, Lukács made a name for himself as a literary and aesthetic
theorist with a number of well-received articles. He worked and
participated in intellectual circles in Budapest, Berlin (where he was
heavily influenced by Georg Simmel), Florence and Heidelberg. In 1910
and 1911, Lukács published his essay collection Soul and
Form and, together with Lajos Fülep, founded a short-lived
avant-garde journal, A Szellem (The
Spirit). Lukács' life was shaken up during that time
by the death of his close friend Leo Popper and by the suicide of Irma
Seidler who had been his lover. Lukács felt responsible for
Seidler's death and it proved to have an enormous impact on him,
which is reflected in his 1911 essay “On Poverty of
Spirit”.

During the same period, Lukács developed a close connection to
Max and Marianne Weber in Heidelberg, to Ernst Bloch and to the
Neo-Kantian philosophers Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask. Between 1912
and 1914 he worked on a first attempt to formulate a systematic
approach to art, which remained unpublished during his lifetime
(GW 16). After the beginning of the First World War,
Lukács was exempted from the frontline of military service. In
1914, he married the Russian political activist (and convicted
terrorist) Jelena Grabenko.

In 1913, Lukács began participating in the influential
“Sunday circle” of Budapest intellectuals, which included
Karl Mannheim. After serving in the Hungarian censor's office,
he published The Theory of the Novel (1916), which is perhaps
the best-known work of his early period. After returning to Heidelberg
in 1917, he left Grabenko and, despite Weber's support, failed
to receive the Habilitation (teaching qualification) at
the University of Heidelberg. Between 1916 and 1918 he also resumed
his work on aesthetics, resulting in the unpublished manuscript of the
so-called “Heidelberg Aesthetics” (GW 17). To the
surprise of many of his friends, Lukács joined the Hungarian
Communist Party in 1918; although, as his essay on “Bolshevism
as a Moral Problem” attests, not without reservations.

After a rapid ascent as one of the leading thinkers of the party,
Lukács became more involved in day-to-day politics: after the
revolution in 1919, he first served as a deputy commissar and then as
commissar of public education in Béla Kun's
government. Later, when war broke out he served as a political
commissar in the Hungarian Red Army (in this position, he also ordered
the execution of several soldiers, see Kadarkay 1991: 223). After the
communist government was defeated, Lukács fled to Vienna at the
end of 1919 where he married his second wife, Gertrud Bortstieber (who
had given birth to their daughter Anna in January 1919). Being in
charge of coordinating the clandestine activities of the exiled
communist party, he remained under constant threat of expulsion to
Hungary. For this reason, after Lukács was arrested, in November
1919 an appeal (“Save Georg Lukács”) appeared in a
Berlin newspaper signed by many intellectuals—among them
Heinrich and Thomas Mann.

In 1923, Lukács published his most famous work, the essay
collection History and Class Consciousness. In this text,
Lukács argued forcefully for a philosophically refined version of
Marxism as a solution to the problems that have vexed modern
philosophy and developed the idea of society as a
“totality”—an ontological commitment which is
derived from Hegel, while at the same time incorporating sociological
insights into the character of modern societies which he had acquired
through Weber and Simmel. This reformulation of the philosophical
premises of Marxism, however, entailed a rejection of the then
contemporary forms of simplistic materialism and naive scientism
endorsed by many Soviet party intellectuals. Unsurprisingly, the party
orthodoxy condemned the book as an expression of ultra-leftism (in
spite of Lukács' pro-Leninist revisions to the articles
which had already appeared previously, see Löwy 1979:
172–179). Nevertheless, his position as one of the leading
intellectuals of Marxism was cemented, allowing Lukács to
participate at the forefront of the debates of the time, as for example with a quickly written study on Lenin on the occasion of
the Soviet leader's death in 1924. However, in 1928, Lukács
had to virtually give up his political activities after he presented
the so-called “Blum theses” (see 1928). In this draft of a
party platform, which was named after his party alias, he argued for a
democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants in Hungary. These
theses were condemned as a right-wing deviation by the party (earning
him the status of being condemned both as a left-wing and a right-wing
dissident within a timeframe of five years).

Following another arrest by the Austrian authorities, Lukács
left Vienna in 1929 first for Berlin, then for Budapest where he lived
underground for three months. Eventually, he was summoned by the
Soviet party leadership to Moscow where he stayed from 1930 on,
leaving only for Comintern missions in Berlin and for
Tashkent during the war. In Moscow, Lukács held a position at the
Marx-Engels Institute. During this time, he first came into contact
with Marx's early works which had previously remained
unpublished. As Lukács became (at least outwardly) increasingly
subservient to the Stalinist orthodoxy (while producing a first
attempt of a new Marxist aesthetics in The Historical Novel),
he publicly retracted his views espoused in History and Class
Consciousness (see 1933b). The degree of Lukács'
agreement with Stalinism is disputed to this day (see Lichtheim 1970;
Deutscher 1972; Kolakowski 1978; Pike 1988). However, it is clear from
his writings that he publicly defended Stalinist dogmas both in
aesthetics and politics during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (1933a,
1938, 1951) while criticizing Stalin and Stalinism repeatedly later on
(see 1957, 1962).

In 1944, Lukács returned to Budapest and became a professor at
the university. In 1948, he published his two-volume study titled
The Young Hegel (written partly during the 1930s in Moscow)
and participated in debates about socialist realism in literature. In
1949, he also travelled to Paris to engage in a debate about
existentialism and Marxism with Sartre. The works of this period
reflect both his allegiance to orthodox Soviet Marxism and his
uneasiness with the Stalinist post-war situation. A widely criticized
example of his writing of this time is The Destruction of
Reason, published in 1954. It denounced much of the German
philosophical and literary tradition after Marx as an outgrowth of
“irrationalism” and as bearing responsibility for the
ascent of National Socialism. During this time, Lukács also
continued to defend a rather conservative ideal of realism in
aesthetics (see 1951).

After again being subjected to criticism from the party orthodoxy
and being virtually excluded from public life in the mid-1950s, the
Hungarian uprising against the Soviet rule in 1956 opened a new
chapter for Lukács. After Stalin's death, it became not
only increasingly possible for him to publicly criticize Stalinism and
to voice again, for the first time since 1928, his vision for the
future of Marxism, arguing that the communist party should regain
public trust by competing with other leftist forces within a
multi-party democracy. He also served in the short-lived Nagy
government as minister for public education. After the subsequent
Soviet invasion, he was arrested and imprisoned in Romania. In
contrast to other members of the government, he was not executed but
merely expelled from the communist party, which he only rejoined in
1969. From the 1960s on, Lukács—having had to retire from
all academic positions—worked on his two-volume
Specificity of the Aesthetic and on a Marxist ethics, later
partly transformed into the Ontology of Social Being, which
he never finished during his lifetime. He also continued to publish
extensively on literature and art. Lukács passed away on June 4,
1971 in Budapest.

Lukács' “early” writings—before his
turn to Marxism in 1918—are animated by concerns that are also
present, albeit transformed, in his later political thought. In this
period, Lukács formulates a sophisticated aesthetic theory and a
devastating critique of modern culture that he diagnoses to be
governed by an insurmountable abyss between objective cultural forms
and the richness of “genuine life”.

He takes up the issue of the relationship between
“form” and “life” in three different but
closely interconnected discussions: First, there is the question of
how the element of “form” distinguishes art as a separate
sphere of value. This is most explicitly discussed in his two attempts
at a systematic philosophy of art. Second, there is the
sociological-historical question about the relation between individual
and collective life and the (aesthetic and ethical) forms in modern
bourgeois society, that is, at a historical moment in which a
“totality” of life has vanished. This topic is dominant
both in the History of the Modern Drama of 1909 and in the
Theory of the Novel of 1916. Finally, a third strand concerns
existential and ethical questions, most explicitly discussed in
Soul and Form and in the essay “On Poverty of
Spirit”.

Another central concept in Lukács' thought is that of
“totality”. With “totality” Lukács refers
to a whole set of elements that are meaningfully interrelated in such
a way that the essence of each element can only be understood in its
relation to the others. “Life”, as Lukács understands
it, is the intrinsic richness and potentiality of experiences and
actions of individuals and societies, rather than only the temporal
unfolding of empirical lives. Both individual and social life is in
principle capable of forming an integrated totality. However, this is
only the case if the essential properties of its elements are
intelligible in terms of their relations to other particulars of
life. Only in this case, life can have a meaningful form which is not
a mere restriction. Lukács claims that this was the case in the
times of Homeric Greece where a totality of meaning was immanent to
life itself. This immanence of meaning and the totality it constituted
was, however, lost in the subsequent historical development,
transforming form into an external factor to life.

In regard to the relation between form and life, we can distinguish
between forms that are forms of life itself, produced by that
life, and abstract forms which are imposed onto life from the
outside. When a form is imposed on life that is not a form of
that specific mode of life (or if the form in question cannot be
realized in empirical life), such an imposition always runs the risk
of distorting the meanings of the particular actions or persons. But
at the same time, form is necessary for life to become intelligible
and unified (see Bernstein 1984: 77–80). Within the sphere of
individual agency, persons face this dilemma in regard to the choice
of either authentically expressing the particular meanings of their
own life, risking the loss of form and, consequently, the loss of
intelligible access to these meanings, or of imposing an external form
as a normative demand on their life, risking distortion,
inauthenticity and even the denial of life itself.

With the exception of the History of the Modern Drama
(1909), Lukács' earliest work is self-consciously
essayistic in form. As Lukács explains in “On the Nature
and Form of the Essay” (1911a), this is because the essay is the
primary form of writing which addresses life through the medium of
form (1911a: 8) and which takes form (in particular, the form of a
work of art) seriously as a reality of its own. Essayistic writing,
however, is not only writing about form; it also must always
examine the conditions under which life can be given a form in the
first place. This problem becomes virulent in modernity where the form
of life is no longer something unproblematically present. Rather, the
existing ways in which life could give itself a form have become
problematic and are experienced as abstractions.

Following Weber, Lukács characterizes the bourgeois form of
life in terms of the primacy of an ethics of work and inner
strength. Corresponding to this form of life, Lukács claims,
there has been a form of art which was capable of expressing an
unproblematic relationship between life and form (for example, in
Theodor Storm's case, the insight that the bourgeois citizen
must concentrate on his work and entrust the formation of his life to
fate, see 1910a: 60). However, when that bourgeois life-form
disappeared, the remaining bourgeois “way of life”
transformed into a form of asceticism which became hostile against
life itself. The same holds true for the corresponding movement within
art of rejecting life in favor of “art for its own sake”,
that is, of a form of artistic production that self-consciously (and
with justification) refuses to express life because it has no
foundation in a corresponding life form.

Lukács thus argues that modern art is caught up in the dilemma
of having to achieve a harmony of life and form, either at the expense
of life's intensity and potentiality, or at a purely symbolic
and imaginary level—by effectively withdrawing from life (an
idea he discusses in reference to Novalis, see 1908: 50; see Butler
2010: 9). In both cases, art turns against life. In contrast, a
genuine attempt to give “real” or “absolute
life” (that is, genuinely meaningful life as opposed to the
chaos of “empirical life”, see Márkus 1983: 11;
Löwy 1979: 104) a distinct form necessarily involves a rejection
of the meaningless necessities of empirical life. Instead, such an
attempt must endorse a form of life that cannot be incorporated into
ordinary life. In one of the essays published in Soul and
Form, titled “The Metaphysics of Tragedy” (1910b),
Lukács ascribes this task to the form of modern tragedy. When
nature and fate have become “terrifyingly soulless”
(1910b: 154) and any hope for a “friendly order” (ibid.)
has disappeared, the tragic becomes a task—to reject ordinary
life in favor of the opportunity to “live within the periphery
of tragedy” (1910b: 173).

The ethical dimension of this relation between life and form
becomes most explicit in Lukács' essay on Kierkegaard and
in “On Poverty of Spirit”. Kierkegaard's rejection
of Regine Olsen's love is lauded for its expression of the need
of giving one's own empirical life a definite, unambiguous form
and thereby transforming it into absolute life—in
Kierkegaard's case, by attempting to perform an authentic
gesture (1910c: 28). But Kierkegaard's ethical position
suffers from a defect: Kierkegaard attempts to reconcile ordinary life
with a form that is appropriate for genuine, “absolute”
life (that is, he tries to live tragic life as ordinary life). Due to
its inherent ambiguity and foreignness to form, ordinary life cannot
ever be successfully lived in such a way (1910c: 40). Thus,
Kierkegaard's attempt to live a genuine life was doomed from the
beginning.

The conclusion of this line of thought seems to point towards an
insoluble dilemma. But already the 1911 essay “On Poverty of
Spirit”—a fusion between an autobiographical reflection
on Lukács' role in the suicide of Irma Seidler and an
examination of theoretical issues—points towards a different
conclusion: an emphatic rejection of an “ethics of
duty”. Lukács argues that a formal, rule-based ethics leads
into alienation from life. Even though the submission to
“form” that is implicit in adopting a formalist ethics is
the basis from which social life becomes possible in the first place,
it keeps persons from having “human relationships”. As
Lukács writes, “Form […] is like a bridge that
separates” (1911b: 44). Lukács contrasts such an ethics
with the ideal of “goodness” which represents “real
life” rather than the “impure and sterile” life of
most people. “Goodness” involves a rejection of rules as
well as duties towards others in favor of pure actions that might be
sinful, chaotic and futile. The soul of the good person, Lukács
claims, “is a pure white slate, upon which fate writes its
absurd command” (1911b: 48). This anti-consequentialist and
anti-deontological ethics of pure action is finally developed into a
conception of “works”. Only by sacrificing themselves for
the sake of works, persons (or, as Lukács' narrator rather
claims, men) can empty themselves of the psychological content of
everyday life and prepare themselves for the grace of goodness. This
final line of thought already points towards a social utopia: by
overcoming the alienated world of “mechanical forces”
(1911b: 45) through works that transform life, we may recover a
genuine community with and a direct knowledge of others wherein
“subject and object collapse into each other” (1911b:
46). This vision of a final overcoming of alienation seems
to lead out of the theoretical impasse of Lukács' earlier
position, but only at the price of endorsing ethical decisionism and
messianism.

While Lukács' cultural criticism intends to capture
distinctively modern phenomena, its claims are backed up by an
aesthetic theory that aims to discover the transcendental conditions
of the aesthetic that are removed from historic variability. Even
though Lukács combines these elements in his writing with the
theory of culture developed by Georg Simmel and with the Nietzschean
idea of an intrinsic tension between life and form, his early work
cannot be comprehended without considering this Neo-Kantian
framework. This framework is most clearly visible in his two
systematic attempts to produce a philosophy of art in Heidelberg
(GW 16 and 17). Here, Lukács attempts to provide a
philosophical explanation of the conditions of possibility of art that
takes the work of art as the fundamental phenomenon of
aesthetic meaning, rather than deriving this meaning from either
artistic creation or aesthetic experience.

In his early aesthetic thought, Lukács distinguishes—taking up Neo-Kantian terminology—different spheres of reality
from each other. The most immediate sphere is the “reality of
experience” in which everything appears as an object of
qualitative experience, or (in the 1916 version) as having a given
object character (Gegenständlichkeit) that is
fundamentally heterogeneous. Lukács envisages two arguments
concerning the role that art can play in relation to this sphere: in
the 1912 Philosophy of Art, he argues that any adequate
communication of meaning between persons must appear impossible from
within this sphere, since the infinite qualitative differences of
experience cannot ever be successfully communicated. However, the
inevitable desire to communicate meaning drives people to adopt
different means of communication that, even though inadequate for
expressing the reality of experience, enable persons to overcome their
separateness by relating to each other in terms of other spheres of
reality (for example, the sphere of logical validity). While logic and
ethics constitute “pure” spheres of communicable meaning,
however, the categories of the aesthetic cannot be ever so fully
separated from the possibility of experience.

In the 1916 Aesthetics, Lukács adopts a much more
radical version of this Neo-Kantian argument: whereas the reality of
everyday life is characterized by a heterogeneity of forms of objects,
the aesthetic sphere of validity is characterized by a distinct form
of objectivity that is legislated as a norm by experience
itself. Thus, the contrast between everyday life and art is not
between experience and validity but between everyday life and the
homogeneous form appropriate to the autonomy of experience
(GW 17: 36). Consequently, in comparison to the logical and
ethical spheres of validity, aesthetics has a distinct status. While
in these other spheres of validity, objective norms and subjective
attitudes are fully separable, the autonomy of experience legislates a
normative standard that involves a specific relationship between
subjective experience and objective norm.

The primary value of the aesthetic sphere, Lukács claims, can
only be the work of art itself since this value is presupposed by any
description of artistic production or aesthetic
experience. Lukács proposes to explain the character of this
distinctive value by undertaking a phenomenological analysis of
artistic creation and aesthetic receptivity. Even though these
activities are not constitutive for the value of works of art, they
can still serve as a basis for reconstructing the independent
normative status of the aesthetics. The result of this analysis is a
conception of the work of art as an ideal of homogeneous unity of
form and material. In the 1912 Philosophy of Art, this
unity is characterized by the experiential content becoming completely
communicable and containing all possible aspects of a possible
experience, thus forming a “concrete totality”
(GW 16: 83, 91, 112 and GW 17: 110) of its own world
within itself. In contrast, in the 1916 Aesthetics, it is
brought about through a process in which the constitutive function of
experience becomes completely autonomous, determining both form and
content. Such an ideal work of art is, in virtue of this harmony, a
Utopian fulfillment of the attitudes that are already operative in the
ordinary world of experience (GW 16: 82).

Works of art therefore present us with an “immanent
utopia” of experience, that is, with the vision of a form of
experience that is ordered and unified by a constitutive
“standpoint” (GW 16: 82) such that form and
content are completely appropriate for each other. Because of these
features, such an experience embodies a maximum of objectivity in the
subject's relation to an object completely appropriate to its
subjectivity (GW 17: 100). This finally answers the question regarding the
a priori conditions of art: as an ideal of a particular kind
of possible experience, the work of art is always historically
specific. However, both the potentiality to become a totality
in virtue of their form and the normative demand to do so are
timeless, a priori conditions of the possibility of works of
art in the Neo-Kantian sense (GW 16: 168).

Another aspect of Lukács' early work is concerned with
the historical changes in our relations to form. In this early
analysis of the history and sociology of drama (History of the
Modern Drama, 1909) Lukács first develops an account of the
connection between aesthetic genres and historical changes. He argues
that drama is connected to specific historic circumstances: for drama
to exist, there needs to be a prevailing Weltanschauung
(GW 15: 44) that seeks drama as its preferred mode of
expression. This tragic Weltanschauung only exists in
periods of societal disintegration where individual emotions and
objective facts are in a relation of mismatch so intense that they
elicit heroic forms of the denial of social reality.

In opposition to mere disintegration without tragedy, Lukács
claims that tragedy arises only in one particular kind of historical
situation. In each society, the ruling class legitimizes its own
dominance with reference to certain valuations
(Wertungen). However, if that class then begins to
experience these very same valuations as problematic or sterile, this
signifies the beginning of its downfall (GW 15: 47). In such
situations, the formal element of drama and tragedy, which involves
the paradoxical relation between highly universalized form and highly
individualized content, mirrors the paradoxical relation between form
and life that individuals experience in their own relation to
society.

In The Theory of the Novel of 1916, Lukács takes up
some of these themes. At the same time, he turns towards a philosophy
of history in order to clarify the relationship between historical
changes of transcendental standpoints and the “pure forms”
of aesthetic genres. The prime object of his discussion is the epic:
Lukács claims that works of art that belong to this genre—for example Homeric epic poetry and the modern novel—must
always express the objective reality of social and individual human
life as it is (1916: 46). However, because of the distinctive
“metaphysical conditions” of different epochs, they
express this objective reality in radically different forms. Epic
poetry in Homeric times takes its starting point from a world which
constituted a closed totality (1916: 33), that is, a world in
which life, culture, meaning, action and social institutions formed a
harmonious whole. In particular, Lukács claims that in ancient
Greece the “essence” of being was immanent to life rather
than having to be sought out in a transcendent realm. Furthermore,
there was no gap between individual consciousness and objectified
meaning in the world that would have required the individual to
project meaning onto the world. Individuals in ancient Greece only had
to accept the totality of meaning within their world, even if they
were, in some particular situation or another, unable to understand
it. In contrast, modern society is constitutively alienated: merely
conventional social institutions devoid of meaning exist disconnected
from individuals and their highly individualized
self-understanding. Therefore, in modern society meaning can only be
found within the inner life of the individual and cannot become
recognized in the world (1916: 61).

Starting from this description of a closed totality, Lukács
claims that the intellectual history of the world is already
prefigured in the cultural history of ancient Greece within the
movement from epic poetry to tragedy and then to philosophy. In the
course of this movement, the sources of meaning became increasingly
more transcendent to immediate life. As a consequence, Lukács
argues that these three genres inhabit three different
“transcendental loci” (1916: 36) concerning the
question of totality. Tragedy and philosophy have already realized the
loss of a meaningful totality, whereas the possibility of epic poetry
depends on its immanence. As Lukács claims, this is the reason
for why “art forms become subject to a historico-philosophical
dialectic” (1916: 39).

The cause for this development is the loss of totality through
historical changes where the objective institutions of social life
became merely conventional, a purely external “second
nature” (1916: 62f., 112). This alienation of the individual
from her world leads to a situation of “transcendental
homelessness” (1916: 40, 60) in which individuals must take up a
purely normative stance of a “should be” (1916: 47)
towards the world. The novel is always relating to the development of
such individuals. This development can take the shape of a
subjective-idealist illusion (e.g., as in “Don
Quixote”) or of a disillusion, that is, of individuals
understanding the impossibility of finding meaning within their
world. Lukács thus argues that the novel is the form of epic
writing that is appropriate for a specific moment in history. In
modernity, epic writing has no longer any distinct form that could
express any particular relation between life and essence within a
totality. Rather, the form of the novel is an attempt to deal with the
absence of this relation (1916: 59; see Jameson 1971: 172).

Lukács' understanding of alienation as a historical loss
of totality and the consequent problem of form allows him to also
formulate the kernel of a utopian vision: the very form of the novel
points to the possibility of a renewed relation between individual and
world where meaning can again be found. Lukács sees this utopian
dimension of modern novels expressed most clearly in Goethe's
“Wilhelm Meister”, Tolstoy and Dostoyevski.

Lukács' 1918 conversion to communism and his subsequent
engagement with philosophical Marxism not only confounded his friends,
even for today's readers, it can be difficult to track the many
shifts in Lukács theoretical commitments between 1918 and
1923.

In the December 1918 article on “Bolshevism as an Ethical
Problem”, Lukács draws a connection between his newfound
Marxist convictions and the ethical views he had previously held:
whereas the historical necessity of class struggle is only a
descriptive claim of Marxism, the normative, ethical
demand to overcome such a struggle and to establish a classless
society must be separated from any issue of truth and be recognized as
an utopian form of ethical idealism, appropriate to the expression of
a pure will. At this point in 1918, Lukács still thinks that the
specific content of this ideal leads into a paradoxical situation: in
order to enable the proletarian “messianic class” (1918:
218) to overcome class society, it must first seize power by creating
the most extreme form of class dominance, i.e., a
dictatorship. Bolshevism thus presupposes the conviction that evil
actions can produce good outcomes, or, as Lukács puts it in the
essay on “Tactics and Ethics”, that tragedy cannot be
avoided in revolutionary politics (1919a: 10). However, by the time
History and Class Consciousness appeared, Lukács seems
to have thought of himself as having found another conception of
revolutionary action that paved the way for a new approach to
political practice.

At the foundation of this new conception lies the theory of
reification that Lukács introduces in the essay on
“Reification and the consciousness of the
proletariat”. This essay is not only credited to be one of the
classics of Western Marxism, but also as spelling out the paradigmatic
“central problem” (Brunkhorst and Krockenberger 1998) of
Critical Theory.

In his essay on reification, Lukács frames his basic argument
as an extension of Marx's analysis of the “fetishism of the
commodity form” in Capital I, whereby Marx refers to
the phenomenon of social relations between producers of commodities
that appear in capitalism under the guise of objective, calculable,
properties of things (“value”). The form which commodities
acquire due to this fetishism has gradually become, Lukács
claims, the “universal category of society as a whole”
(1923a: 86). In capitalist societies, the commodity form even becomes
the dominant form of objectivity itself
(Gegenständlichkeitsform, a Neo-Kantian term). This
process has both an objective and a subjective dimension: objectively,
the qualitative homogeneity and continuity of human work is destroyed
when industrial work processes become rationalized in a way that is
appropriate to understanding them as commodity exchanges. Their
mechanization and specialization leads not only to a fragmentation of
human life but also to the destruction of the “organic,
irrational and qualitatively determined unity of the product”
(1923a: 88). On the subjective side, reification entails a
fragmentation of human experience, leading to an attitude of
“contemplation” where one passively adapts to a law-like
system of social “second nature” and to an objectifying
stance towards one's own mental states and capacities.

As Lukács writes about the commodity form,

[it] stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his
qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his
personality, they are things which he can “own” or
“dispose of” like the various objects of the external
world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be
cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic
“qualities” into play without their being subjected
increasingly to this reifying process. (1923a: 100)

Lukács calls this development “reification”. It is
a process which affects four dimensions of social relations: the
socially created features of objects (primarily their features as
commodities), the relations between persons, their relations to
themselves and, finally, the relations between individuals and society
as a whole (Stahl 2011). The objective and subjective dimensions of
the dominance of the commodity form constitute a complex of
reification because the properties of objects, subjects and social
relations become “thinglike” in a particular way. These
properties become independent, quantifiable, non-relational features
that must remain alien to any subjective meaning that one could attach
to them. Additionally, by losing grip of the qualitative dimensions of
their social relations, people become atomized and isolated.

With this description of capitalist society, Lukács combines
Weber's theory of rationalization, Simmel's theory of
modern culture and his own idea of a contradiction between form and
life (see Dannemann 1987) with Marx's theory of value. The
resulting theory of reification as a socially induced pathology has
not only had considerable influence on the Frankfurt School (for the
influence of Lukács on Adorno, see Schiller 2011; for the
explicit engagement of the later generations of Frankfurt School
criticism with Lukács see Habermas 1984: 355–365;
Honneth 2008; cf. also Chari 2010), but has also lead Lucien
Goldmann to speculate that Heidegger's Being and Time
is to be read as an answer to Lukács (Goldmann 1977).

Drawing on this idea, Lukács sketches a theory of social
rationalization that goes beyond a mere description of economic
relations and towards a theory of cultural change. The core of this
argument is the claim that the dominance of commodity forms in the
economic sphere must necessarily lead to the dominance of rational
calculation and formal reason in society as a whole. Because a
break with the organic unity and totality of human existence is a
necessary precondition for this development, the commodity form must,
over time, subject all social spheres to its rule. By forcing politics
and law to adapt to the demands of capitalist exchange, the commodity
form consequently transforms these spheres into a mode of rational
calculability (a line of thought clearly stemming from Weber's
analyses)—which helps explain the rise of the bureaucratic
state and the dominance of formal, positive law that continues to
alienate individuals from society and encourages their passivity in
the face of objectified, mechanical rules (1923a: 98).

This development leads into a contradictory situation both on the
practical and the theoretical level: because the process of
rationalization precludes the grasp of any kind of totality, it cannot
ever succeed in making the whole of society subject to rational
calculation for it necessarily must exclude all irrational,
qualitative dimensions from such calculation. As Lukács argues,
the inability of economic rationality to integrate qualitative
features (e.g., of consumption) into a formal system not only
explains the economic crises of capitalism but is also reflected in
the inability of economic science to explain the movements of the
economy (1923a: 105–107). The same holds true for a formalist model of law, which cannot theoretically acknowledge the interdependence of its
principles with their social content and therefore must treat this
content as an extra-legal, irrational foundation (1923a:
107–110).

This analysis of the social and cultural features of reification
allows Lukács, in a third step, to present an analysis of the
“antinomies of bourgeois thought” (1923a: 110). In
attempting to achieve a rational system of principles, modern
philosophy is always, Lukács claims, confronted with the issue of
there being a “content” necessary for the application of
its formal principles of knowledge, a content which cannot be
integrated into a formal philosophical system—a prime example
of which is Kant's “thing in itself” (see Bernstein
1984: 15–22). Kantian dualism is nothing other than the most
self-conscious expression of this “hiatus” between subject
(the source of rational unity) and object (the source of non-rational
content). This dualism between subject and object—and in
ethics, between norms and facts—haunts modern philosophy. As
Fichte and Hegel recognize, this problem arises only because modern
thought takes the contemplative subject of reified self-world
relations as its paradigm, ignoring the alternative of an
active subject that is engaged in the production of
the content. Fichte's proposal to postulate an “identical
subject-object” (that is, a subject that produces
objectivity by positing objective reality as distinct from itself) is
also the key to Lukács' answer. But Fichte's solution
still suffers from an inadequacy in that he conceives of the
constitutive activity still as the act of an individual subject
confronted with an external, alien reality (1923a: 124).

An alternative is to be found in the idealist conception of art as
an activity directed at the creation of a meaningful totality and in
Schiller's view of artistic activity, which is not an
application of external, given laws but a form of play (1923a:
138). However, the conceptualization of practice from the standpoint
of aesthetics obscures its historical dimension. Lukács
acknowledges Hegel as the thinker who came nearest to finding a
solution to this problem by recognizing that it is the totality of
concrete history, understood as the expression of a subject, of a
“we”, which is the only standpoint from which the
antinomies between form and content can be overcome (1923a:
146f.). But Hegel adopts a mythologizing view of this subjectivity in
terms of a “World Spirit” that lies beyond any concrete
historical agency. The subject Hegel desperately tried to find could
only be discovered by Marx—it is the proletariat to which
Lukács assigns the role of the “subject-object” of
history (1923a: 149).

The final step in Lukács' argument is to show that it is
only the proletariat that can understand itself as the producer of the
totality of society and which is thereby able to overcome
reification. Initially, both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie face
the same immediate reality of an alienated world. Bourgeois thought,
however, endorses this facticity and sees every possible
normative stance only as a subjective projection onto a world of
immediate facts. In contrast, the proletariat is unable to remain
within bourgeois ideology. Lukács gives two reasons for this
claim: in the 1920 essay, titled “Class Consciousness”, he
distinguishes between “empirical” and rational,
“imputed” class consciousness (1920a: 51 and 74) that only
constitutes an “objective possibility” given the
interests of the proletariat. In contrast, in the
“Reification” essay, he argues that there is an intrinsic
dialectics within the class consciousness of the proletariat (Arato
and Breines 1979: 131–136; for an epistemological reading see
Jameson 2009, 65ff.), arising from its objective position as mere
object of the social process. In capitalism, the activity of workers
is reduced to a completely quantifiable process. But, at the same
time, workers cannot have any immediate self-consciousness of their
work other than of a qualitatively determined activity. Lukács argues that this
intrinsic tension in the consciousness of the worker constitutes the
objective possibility of the proletariat's grasping three
important things: first, the proletariat's own reified existence
as a product of social mediation, second, the social totality and,
third, the proletariat as the subject-object of that totality.

However, the process of the proletariat becoming self-conscious
does not only describe a theoretical insight. By realizing that it is
the subject-object of history, the proletariat discovers itself to be
the subject of the process of social reproduction (see 1923a: 181;
Jay 1984: 107f), not an object of contemplation. As Lukács
writes, “The act of consciousness overthrows the objective form
of its object” (1923a: 178). The proletariat can thus overcome
reification through a practical engagement with totality—by
consciously transforming it into the product of the
proletariat's collective action—which this totality
in its essence has always already been. Of course, this process is, in
Lukács' mind, nothing other than the communist
revolution. As many critics of Lukács have remarked (Adorno 1973:
190f., Bewes 2002), this seems to commit Lukács to the view that
there can be a complete overcoming of reification resulting in a
totally transparent society. However, this interpretation ignores
Lukács' insistence that the resistance against reification
must be understood as a never-ending struggle (see 1923a: 199, 206;
Feenberg 2011).

As Lukács' essay on the “Problem of
Organisation” (written shortly before the reification essay)
shows, the distinction between “empirical” and
“imputed” class consciousness had not entirely been
resolved by the introduction of a dialectics of consciousness that is
supposed to ground this spontaneous process (1923b). The proletarian
situation does not necessarily entail an immediate consciousness of
the totality. This consciousness remains only an objective
possibility, always threatened by the seductions of the immediate
consciousness. This makes the agency of the communist party a
necessary condition for the revolution. Due to his criticism of
bureaucracy, Lukács cannot endorse Lenin's idea of the
completely rationalized organization of the state (Arato and Breines
1979: 154). Nonetheless, in his political writings immediately
preceding History and Class Consciousness, he seems to
(paradoxically) endorse both a qualified Luxemburgian view of
proletarian spontaneity (for example in 1920b) and an elitist
conception of party vanguardism (a “party myth”, Arato and
Breines 1979: 145). The “unconditional absorption of the total
personality in the praxis of the movement”, Lukács writes,
is “the only possible way of bringing about an authentic
freedom” (1923b: 320).

It is easy to see that the resulting conception of society that
Lukács articulates owes as much to Hegel as to Marx. This
inheritance commits Lukács to a number of methodological claims
which put him into stark opposition not only to social democrats like
Bernstein but also, somewhat unintentionally, to the orthodoxy of the
Soviet party. In his essay “What is Orthodox Marxism?”
(1919b), Lukács contrasts his method with social democratic
economic determinism. He describes Marxism as a purely
methodological commitment to Marx's dialectics rather
than as depending on any belief regarding the truth of Marx's
economic theory. Lukács even goes so far as to claim that
“it is not the primacy of economic motives in historical
explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism
and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality” (1921:
27).

The primacy of the social totality not only affects the Marxist
method, but also the conception of practice and the underlying social
ontology: by insisting on a foundational role of practice in the
social totality, Lukács makes political action rather than labor
into the foundation for overcoming reification (Feenberg 1998). In his
1967 preface to the new edition of History and
Class-Consciousness, Lukács acknowledges (next to a number
of exercises in self-criticism, which appear both unjustified and
externally motivated) that his insistence on this point meant a
departure from Marx's concept of practice (1967: xviii), at least
as interpreted by orthodox Marxists: while Marx had understood
practice primarily as the conscious engagement of humans with
non-human nature, the self-sufficiency of the social for the very
essence of reality had led Lukács to a different understanding of
practice which privileges the theoretical and the political (see also
Jay 1984).

Within his social ontology, Lukács is finally committed to the
claim that the totality of historical processes, rather than
individual facts, are the foundation of objective reality (1923a: 184;
for the resulting view of history see Merleau-Ponty 1973), leading him
to a rejection of all “contemplative” epistemologies (such
as Lenin's) which rely on the idea of a simple correspondence
between thoughts and facts (1923a: 199ff; see also Lichtheim 1970:
62–65; in addition, it follows from the premise that only the
perspective of the social totality solves the epistemological problems
of classical philosophy that Lukács must reject Engels'
claim that the experimental method is a model for the type of
defetishizing praxis that can overcome the subject-object
divide, see 1923a: 131–133). This ontology of pure processuality
finally entails a normative conception of society that is critical
towards all forms of institutional rationalization which are rejected
as forms of alienation across the board. At the same time, in
insisting that the emancipated society must be capable of presenting
itself as a totality for its subjects, Lukács is unable to
discover any resources for progress in the differentiation of social
spheres (Arato and Breines 1979: 155).

By many of those who were looking for a sophisticated Marxist
philosophy, History and Class Consciousness was judged to be
a supremely important book (as for example by Karl Korsch and Ernst
Bloch, see Bloch 1923). The party orthodoxy, however, was not quite so
enamored. In Germany and Hungary, party intellectuals such as Hermann
Duncker and Laszlo Rudas disapproved of the book because of its
idealist tendencies, culminating in its condemnation by Grigory
Zinoviev in his opening address to the June 1924 World Congress of the
Third International (Arato and Breines 1979: 180). Lukács'
hastily composed 1924 study about Lenin (see 1924) finally resolved
the tension between a Luxemburgian view of revolutionary politics as
an expression of the spontaneity of the proletariat and a Leninist
conception of the party as vanguard agent—a tension which
characterizes History and Class Consciousness (see Feenberg
1988)—in favor of the latter. Thus, already at this point in
time, Lukács revises his views in the face of orthodox criticism,
anticipating a theoretical development towards a more traditional form
of Marxism to which he subscribes for the remainder of his life (see
also the unpublished defense of History and Class
Consciousness in 1925a and Löwy 2011).

While the condemnation of Lukács' work by party
intellectuals (and Lukács' compromising reaction) might
have been motivated by political expediency, there were real
shortcomings in the conception of society and in the conception of
political practice contained in History and Class
Consciousness: In particular, the idea of the proletariat as the
“subject-object” of history seemed to entail a Fichtean
conception of the self-constitutive capacities of the revolutionary
agent, unlimited by historical circumstances and, correspondingly, of
a self-constitutive form of practice, hostile to any objectivity. This
conception imports moments that are alien to a Marxist view of history
into his theory (even on a non-orthodox reading of Marx). In spite of
these objections, in his later work, Lukács remains committed to
the idea that understanding society as a totality must be the basis of
the social ontology of a non-reductive Marxism. He admits, however,
that the notion of totality as the product of a collective subject, as
he developed it in 1923, needed to be modified in order to remedy
these problems.

These problems motivate Lukács' turn to another model of
practice—a model of political and social practice which he
attempts to work out up until the end of his life. While already the
critique of Fichteanism in his writings between 1923 and 1928—for example in his review of an edition of Lasalle's letters
(1925b) and in a short piece on Moses Hess (1926)—constitutes
a significant step towards such a new model, it was impossible for him
to write anything controversial on contemporary Marxism after the
failure of the “Blum Theses”. Instead, he tackled the
philosophical foundations of these problems in the context of a new
reading of the philosophical tradition, and especially of Hegel.

Already in the reification essay, Lukács describes
Hegel's philosophy as the only “bourgeois” theory of
history and freedom that comes close to a solution of the problem of
reification due to its insight that the abyss between subject and
object can only be overcome by seeing both as elements within an
process of an active production of that relation. Thus, Lukács
remains committed to the claim that Marx social theory must be read as
a critical completion—rather than as a rejection—of
Hegel. This means, however, that he must show that the Hegelian
idealist metaphysics that Marx rejects does not exhaust Hegel's
philosophy. The writings on Hegel, most prominently The Young
Hegel (1948) and the relevant sections in the Ontology of
Social Being, can be read as a defense of this commitment. In the
former work, Lukács argues that Hegel's development of
dialectics was informed by his reading of the British economists
Steuart and Smith. According to Lukács, this empirical grounding
enabled Hegel's dialectics to draw on an idea of objective,
social-historical progress and understand modern society and economy
as a processual totality that is structured by
contradictions. Hegel's view of an ontological dialectics must
therefore be read as reflecting the structure of objective social
reality. The resulting “objectivism” allows Hegel to avoid
the subjectivist conception of dialectics that (as Lukács
alleges) Kant and Fichte still subscribed to. Hegel, however,
subordinates this objectivist ontology to logic in the course of the
development of his system. It is this “logicism”,
i.e., the primacy of categories over being, which leads Hegel to
postulate the idealist conception of the “subject-object”
which is needed to explain the identity of logical categories and
ontological determinations. This split between a “genuine”
dialectics which reflects the objective contradications of society
(even if in an idealist manner) and a “logicist” system is
the main argument in Lukács' discussion of Hegel in the
Ontology (see GW 13: 489f., 506, 520–523)

Hegel's philosophy also helps Lukács to solve another
problem with his own model of praxis developed in History
and Class Consciousness: the problematic relation between
objectivation (Vergegenständlichung),
externalization (Entäußerung) and alienation
(Entfremdung). For Hegel's idealism, the
objectivation of spirit is a necessary but deficient stage of its
development that has to be succeeded by a reappropriation of the
externalized content (see also 1967: xxiv; 1948: 539–543;
GW 13: 468–558). This claim directly touches upon the
theory of reification: on the one hand, Lukács claims that Hegel
is correct in seeing the products of human labor—and therefore
also, indirectly, history—as the result of the externalization
of the intentions of individual persons in work, but that he is
mistaken in describing nature as an objectivation of a (transpersonal)
“spirit”. On the other hand, Hegel's theory of
externalization as applied to labor also proves to be an advancement
beyond Lukács' earlier thought. Hegel sees externalization
(that is, the fact that the objects of our labor and the institutions
of society are independent of our consciousness) not as a deficiency,
but rather as a necessary stage in the development of
self-consciousness. On this view, the externalization of the
social is not problematic in itself. Rather, it is alienation
(the causes of which Marx had uncovered) that should be the object of
the critique of reification (see also Pitkin 1987). This distinction
entails the possibility of critique of reification that does not
require a complete reappropriation of objective social forms by a
collective subject. Rather, Hegel's thought suggests a
conception of political praxis that acknowledges the mutual
dialectical dependence of subject and object on each other (and thus
avoids a naive instrumentalism in regards to social institutions) but
avoids the reduction of the political totality to the expression of a
privileged subject-object.

A second, much more problematic set of Lukács' commitments becomes explicit in
the writings between the 1930s and the 1950s. This concerns his
conviction that, after Hegel, modern thought has become sharply
divided into the opposing tendencies of Marxist dialectics and of
bourgeois “irrationalism”. Lukács' view that
all non-Marxist theorists after Hegel—including Schelling,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger—can be subsumed under the
label of irrationalism (a blanket term which, depending on the
context, refers to everything from theories of “intellectual
intuition”, ontological subjectivism, and
“aristocratic” epistemological positions to the denial of
progress in history) is motivated by an earnest desire to apply a
method of “immanent critique” (see Aronowitz 2011) to the
developments within philosophy that have facilitated the rise of
National Socialism. In these writings, he also discusses some of his
former friends like Weber and Simmel, who are both accused of at least
partially succumbing to the irrationalist seduction. But while some of his
arguments against Heidegger resemble Adorno's critique (see also
Adorno 1997), the philosophical arguments for his simplistic
distinction between progressive materialism and irrationalism—in particular those that he presents in The Destruction of
Reason (according to George Lichtheim “the worst book he
ever wrote”, Lichtheim 1970: 68)—are for the most part
dogmatic and superficial. A number of particularly problematic claims
are made in the postscript to the Destruction where
Lukács not only defends the Soviet Union under Stalin, but also
accuses Bertrand Russell of being secretly religious (1954: 808) and
characterizes Wittgenstein and the pragmatists as proponents of a form
of subjectivism that facilitates the rise of a new fascism (1954:
782ff.; for other examples, see the unpublished 1933a).

The most fundamental level on which Lukács develops his
revised model of Hegelian Marxism is one of ontology, or, more
specifically, of an “ontology of social being”. This
ontology is intended, at least outwardly, to be a faithful
interpretation of the ontological implications of Marxism. However,
the way in which Lukács develops these ontological
foundations—as well as his extended and sympathetic discussion
of Nicolai Hartmann—betrays the way in which they function to
support his own, Hegelian Marxism against dogmatic Historical
Materialism (although, as Heller 1983 notes, not without a number of
unsolved contradictions).

In terms of a general ontology, Lukács claims that we can
distinguish three levels of being in the world: material or inorganic
being, organic life and social reality (GW 13: 22). All three
levels are distinguished by a division between the genuine essence of
entities and their appearance. While on all three levels,
entities appear as fixed objects, their real essence is always
that of interrelated, irreversible processes (GW 13:
240). This entails that the basic form of all being is
temporality and historicity (GW 13: 228). Lukács claims
that his position on this point takes up insights from Hegel, while avoiding
the “logicism” of his ontology and his teleological
metaphysics, allowing only for causal, not teleological determinations
of these processes in the inorganic and organic case.

While his general ontology remains rather underdeveloped and is not
informed by much knowledge of concurrent philosophical developments
(apart from the mentioned discussion of Hartmann), Lukács'
theory of social reality has more contemporary relevance. Social
reality, Lukács claims, differs from the other levels of
reality insofar as it is, in contrast to them, not only governed by
causal, non-teleological laws. Social reality also contains an element
of teleology as a result of “teleological
positing” (GW 13: 20; 1971c: 12ff.). Due to their
ability to perform labor, humans can “posit” functions or
goals that are to govern the natural, causal processes that they
manipulate. By choosing one of the potential results of the employment
of their natural and technological capacities as the correct one,
individuals can create a distinction between successful and
unsuccessful execution of their intended actions in labor. This,
Lukács' argues, introduces normative distinctions or values
into the world (see 1971b: 75f and 153–156; 1968: 140). This not
only explains “use value” in the sense of economic
utility, but—because the economic development of society over
time necessarily produces forms of social reality which are
independent from the economy—Historical Materialism can also
allow for forms of socially instituted value that are irreducible to
utility (1971b: 153). In particular, Lukács claims that the
objectification of human intentions in institutions enables us to
understand the existence of objective values as products of
social-historical developments without sliding into historical
relativism. However, as his own students immediately noticed, this
explanation remains too unclear to solve the problem of normativity
for Marxism (see Fehér et al., 1983). The same doubts remain in regard
to Lukács' further claim that there is one fundamental,
immanent value of social history, namely the unfettered development of
human capacities (GW 14: 153).

Because Lukács sees the process of labor as the foundation of
all social and normative phenomena (see also 1971c: 65; Thompson
2011), the totality of society can be described as the totality of all
relations between the teleological acts of “positing”
conditions of success in labor. Even though Lukács acknowledges
intentional consciousness as an irreducible factor in these acts (see
Lukács 1968: 138), they are still determined by the objective,
historical development of social relations both in terms of the human
desires that drive them, in terms of the systemic interdependence of
their unintended consequences and in terms of the technological
feasibility of their results. Consequently, over time, the social
becomes more and more determined by its own history, rather than by
nature alone (1971b: 75). Nevertheless, the positing of teleology is
never completely causally determined by society because it
always involves an individual's choice between alternative
goals. Thus, the very structure of labor is, Lukács claims, the
basis of individual freedom and the basis of individual personality
(character being the continual process of choosing between
alternatives and forming oneself thereby, see GW 13:
62ff).

From these ontological commitments, it follows that the existence
of the social totality depends on the intentionality which guides
individual acts of labor and vice versa (see Tertullian
1988). Lukács therefore describes social phenomena—as
language and institutions—as modifications and
“mediations” of the relations of the labor process. That
is, they are media of “indirect” teleological positing
because they enable forms of action which do not directly modify
nature but which indirectly aspire to bring other persons to do so
(GW 14: 172; 1968: 142). Even though he remains committed to
the primacy of labor, Lukács allows for these linguistic and
institutional mediations to acquire a dynamic of their own over time,
becoming independent of the goal of dominating nature, in particular
because they allow for a generalization of the cognitive grasp of
particular phenomena (see GW 13: 47; GW 14: 165ff,
342–357) and an increase of distance between subject and objects
(1971c: 100). This understanding of institutions entails that
politics, as a form of action directed towards the social totality as
a whole, must treat this totality, on the one hand, as being dependent
on natural and biological facts that limit its potential
transformations and, on the other hand, as increasingly being
determined by laws of its own (GW 14: 432).

Lukács' conception of individuality as a product of the
choice between alternatives within a socially determined totality
finally leads to a theory of alienation that partially
replaces the theory of reification of the younger Lukács. Whereas
the latter theory was closely connected to a theory of collective
reappropriation of society, Lukács describes alienation in the
Ontology as primarily the result of social conditions that
make individuals into merely “particular”
personalities (GW 14: 530), instead of allowing them to
develop their capacities to the degree that the present development of
productive forces could make possible. This means that alienation (for
instance, the alienation brought about by excessive professional
specialization) must be understood as the socially induced incapacity
of individuals to participate in the “species being” or
the social totality. The overcoming of alienation thus always
demands—along with social changes—subjective
transformation, i.e., individual change (GW 14:
551). This finally points towards the ethical dimension of
the Ontology. Lukács claims that there is a normative
ideal immanent in society as such, namely, the ideal of social
relations that allow all persons to fully participate in the social
totality with their whole personality and thereby realizing their
universal nature.

Compared with
“History and Class Consciousness”, the normative ideal of
the Ontology points to a radically different conception of
political action. In the Ontology, it is not the
self-realization of the collective subject-object in history that is
the defining moment of revolutionary politics, but rather the gradual
realization of the universal nature of humans in their interaction
with society and nature. This suggests a conception of political
praxis which amounts to a form of humanist, democratic
communism and which respects the insight that Lukács had derived
from his re-interpretation of Hegel's philosophy: politics must
be understood as a collective coming to terms with a dialectics
between subjective and objective elements within a social totality
rather than as the becoming conscious of the identical subject-object
of history.

While Lukács only makes his ontological commitments explicit
towards the end of his life, they inform the development of his
aesthetics from the 1930s on. From the general materialist premises of
his ontology and from his rejection of the epistemology of History
and Class Consciousness in favor of the Leninist alternative (see
1938), it follows that cultural and mental phenomena must always be
seen as reflections (or “mirroring”,
Widerspiegelungen) of an objective reality (GW
11: 22, 55).

Like science and ethics, art breaks with the immediacy of our
everyday practical engagements that dominates the more common forms of
reflection (GW 11: 207, 214). Aesthetic reflections of
reality, however, differ from science (or, more generally, from
conceptual and theoretical reflections) in three regards: First, while
scientific knowledge presupposes a
“deanthropomorphization” of the subject matter (meaning
that reality is presented as independent from human desires or
subjectivity), aesthetic subject matter remains anthropomorphized as
far as art presents reality in the form of inner experience. Thus,
aesthetic representation always remains connected to a possible
“evocation” of reactions of a human subject (GW
11: 438). Second, while science is always conceptually mediated, art
breaks with the immediacy of everyday life in favor of a new immediacy
of experience (GW 11: 237, 509, 513). And third, while
science reflects reality in the form of general laws, aesthetic
representation is always bound to represent universal aspects of the
essence of reality in the form of the individuality (or specificity)
of the work of art (Lukács' term for individuality is
Besonderheit, a concept which he takes up from
Hegel's Science of Logic where it describes the
dialectical sublation of both generality and particularity within the
“notion”).

According to this conception of art as a mode of reflection, the
function of a work of art is to present humans with the totality of
the objective, historical reality within an “homogeneous
medium” (such as pure visibility in painting or poetic language
in poetry, see GW 11: 642). The employment of such a medium
makes it possible for art to single out and represent the universal
aspects of a given form of human reality as a “closed
world-in-itself” or as an “intensive totality”
(GW 11: 238, 461, 774; GW 12: 232). As Lukács
argues (GW 11: 660), the medium of each specific form of art
establishes strict laws that allow the work of art to adequately
present the whole world of humanity from a specific standpoint. For
this reason, such works of art allow us to comprehend the universal
aspects of our existence and to consciously participate in the
collective life of humanity (GW 11: 519–530). This
effect of art Lukács describes as “defetishization”
(GW 11: ch. 9), anticipating the ethical demand of
overcoming alienation that he formulates in the Ontology. A
successful work of art can thus have the effect of
“catharsis” (GW 11: 811), transforming the
“whole person” of everyday life (the person who is
entangled in their diverse relationships) into a “person as a
whole” (the person who realizes their humanity by acquiring a
sense of self-consciousness regarding the richness of human relations
that constitute the historical development of humankind).

Even though they represent objective reality, works of art are, in
virtue of this mode of reflection, subject-dependent because their
character is constituted by their capacity to evoke a subjective
reaction: i.e., an understanding of how the world that is revealed
in art is appropriate for the comprehending subject in its universal
nature (GW 11: 305). This reaction is not only one of passive
acknowledgment; it also actively transforms the subject by
facilitating a consciousness of that very universal nature. Thus, in
the work of art, subjectivity and objectivity are mutually
constitutive for each other. In a transformed sense—as
Lukács explicitly acknowledges (GW 11: 582; GW
12: 217)—the subject-object of idealism is an appropriate
concept for works of art (which, as one might add, therefore fulfills
Lukács' aspirations for the socialist revolution that he
had to renounce both politically and philosophically). Of course, in
this new sense, the term “subject-object” no longer
signifies a privileged agent becoming self-conscious, but only the
interdependence of subjectivity and objectivity in a specific sphere
of experience.

Lukács makes a similar conceptual move by endorsing the claim
that all consciousness is a reflection of reality. On the one hand,
this signals a revision of the epistemological position he had
defended in History and Class Consciousness (where he had
criticized the distinction between a seemingly objective reality and
purely subjective forms of perception) in favor of Lenin's
theory of consciousness. On the other hand, Lukács is keen to
preserve—at least within the boundaries of the aesthetic—room for the idea that some insights can be had only in
relation to a totality that encompasses subjectivity and
objectivity.

Lukács no longer derives his aesthetic commitments at this
point from purely philosophical premises—as he did in his
Heidelberg writings—but rather builds on anthropological
premises (especially concerning the concept of everyday life, in
regard to which he notes the similarity between his analysis and
Heidegger's notion of practical engagement, see GW 11:
68–71, for related points on the Ontology see Joós
1982), psychological theorizing (proposing an extension of
Pavlov's behaviorist classification of signal systems, see
GW 12: 11–191) and a speculative notion of world
history. The most important concept binding these premises together is
the idea of mimesis. Mimetic behavior, Lukács argues, is
a fundamental way of human coping with the world and the source of
both magic and art. Through the mimetic imitation of natural
processes, humans acquire the ability to represent the salient aspects
of the world in a closed and totalizing manner, and they gradually
learn to separate such imitations from the necessity of immediate
reaction. In contrast to magic which does not separate reflection and
objective causation, mimesis in art is consciously taken as a
reflection and evokes the aesthetic effect in its audience
specifically in virtue of this feature (GW 11: 382). In other
words, while both art and science overcome the superstition of magic,
only art can retain the mimetic dimension of representation.

Lukács' commitment to a conception of the work of art as
a closed totality, structured by the strict laws of its medium and
objectively reflecting the development of humanity in the mode of
mimetic evocation, has considerable implications for his own judgments
as an aesthetic theorist. His writings on literary realism that he
published from the 1930s to the 1950s—especially
“Realism in the Balance” (1938), The Historical
Novel (1955), and The Meaning of Contemporary Realism
(1955)—display to various degrees a mixture of philosophical
insight and Stalinist orthodoxy. In any case, they are animated by
strong commitment to the superiority of realism, as exemplified by
Balzac, Tolstoy, Gorky (see GW 5) and Thomas Mann (see 1949),
that he contrasts to the “decadent” avant-garde literature
of his times. This position of his drew sharp criticism, for example
from Seghers, Brecht and Adorno (see Lukács 1981; Brecht 1977;
Adorno 1972; for the Lukács-Brecht debate see Pike 1985).

However, as far as Lukács' commitment to realism
reflects the demand that works of art should present a totality of
meaning that is not alien to the life of individuals, but rather
overcomes the alienation they suffer from in everyday life, it
expresses (even in its most distorted versions) an intuition that
sustains Lukács' work from the beginning: the desire for an
overcoming of the tension between human life and the objective social
forms that constitute modern society.

At various points in his life, Lukács had rejected the
pessimism of his youth. First, he had endorsed an optimism concerning
the capacity of the proletariat to constitute such a totality in
society through a revolutionary overcoming of reification; later on,
this optimism was modified to encompass the ever increasing human
capacities to become self-conscious of their universal character
through a reflection of the existing social totality in the totality
of the work of art. Thus, even at his most conservative moments as a
proponent of Socialist Realism, Lukács is motivated by a keen
intuition concerning the tragic consequences of this aspect of modern
culture and, as the constant revisions of his position show, by a
sensitivity to the inappropriateness of all conceptions of the human
condition which do not appropriately deal with this problem.

Below there is a list of the bibliographical entries for the works
of Lukács that are cited in the main article. English
translations are cited where available. If no translation is
available, I cited Gesammelte Werke. In the remaining cases,
I cited the original publication. Sources are listed by original
publication date.